There are many occasions where a user may want to be notified when his or her credit card or other user account is used, accessed, changed or otherwise altered. For example, a user may want to know when a credit card account has been used to purchase a large screen television for $5000 on the Internet, when a debit card account number is used outside the U.S. to purchase airplane tickets, when his mobile telephone was used to make toll calls or purchases or when a child account user uses the child account to purchase alcohol.
A user may also wish to receive an alert from the account issuer (i.e. a credit card issuer or mobile phone service provider) when the account issuer determines potentially fraudulent activity has occurred in relation to the user's account. The account issuer may contact the user using the contact information it has on file for the user, which is typically a user's phone number, email address and home address. For example, the issuer may call the user at his mobile phone number or send a letter to his home address informing the user that potentially fraudulent or unauthorized activity has been detected. The manner in which a user is alerted can be highly customized according to specific preferences or policies of the user or the account issuer.
A user may wish to receive alerts about his or her credit card accounts being used via an SMS messages sent to his or her mobile telephone, but might rather receive alerts regarding purchases made using one of the mobile phones on his or her mobile telephone service account via a telephone call or SMS message to the primary telephone number on the account. That same user may have several account specific preferences for receiving alerts regarding those accounts depending on account type, transaction amount, transaction type or the time period, the location and style of transaction. Setting up such user and account specific alert preferences can be very time consuming or difficult to reproduce whenever a user makes a change to one or more of his or her user accounts.
For example, a user may change mobile telephone service provider, thereby setting up a new mobile telephone account with that that mobile telephone service provider, but would like to maintain the same terms, conditions and methods of delivery for receiving alerts for the telephone number that is transferred to the new mobile telephone service provider. Similarly, a user may change banks and receive a new credit card account to replace an old household expense credit card account and would like the alert preferences to remain the same as those previously setup with respect to the old household expense credit card. To keep the same alert message settings for the new user accounts, a user would have to submit all of his or her alert message settings to the new mobile telephone service provider and bank. Even if this process was available to the user via online in a website using pull down menus and other convenient user interface features, it would still take the user some amount of time to recall and enter all of his or her preferred user alert message settings. This process is further exasperated if a user has forgotten his particular preferred setting or has a particularly complicated set of user alert message settings.
Furthermore, predefined or issuer specific user alert message settings can vary drastically from one user account issuer to another, thus making it difficult for a user to keep the exact set of user alert message settings to which he or she prefers or has grown accustomed when the user changes user account issuers or opens up a new user account with a new user account issuer. For example, one user account issuer may allow a user to define a threshold amount for all transaction types to trigger a user alert message while another may allow a user to define a different threshold amount for different transaction types categories. As such, it would be difficult for the user or the issuer to translate the user's alert message settings from the later user account issuer to the former.
Embodiments of the present invention address these and other issues individually and collectively.